Dre to Pay $1.5M for "High"

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A federal jury in Los Angeles recommended Tuesday that rapper and producer Dr. Dre pay a British music publishing company $1.5 million for appropriating parts of the 1980 Fatback hit "Backstrokin'" for "Let's Get High," from Dre's album 2001. The songs are built on similar six-note funk bass lines, Dre's slowed to a tempo more suited to the follow-up to his gangsta rap masterpiece The Chronic.

"Backstrokin'," from the 1980 album Hotbox, was Fatback's highest-climbing single. Written by bassist Johnny Flippin and drummer Bill Curtis, it reached Number Three on the R&B chart in 1980. Fatback, a funk collective originally known as the Fatback Band, also made one of the first rap singles ever with their 1979 hit "King Tim III (Personality Jock)."

Minder Music, the London-based company that controls the rights to "Backstrokin'," was intially seeking $3.5 million in damages. Lawyers for Dr. Dre maintain the similarities between the two tracks -- Dre wrote "High" with Eminem and others -- are unintentional, and say they plan to appeal the decision if the judge approves the jury's recommendation.

Dr. Dre's 2001 has sold more than six million copies in the U.S.

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Song Stories

“V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.”

Fishbone | 1985

Quite a few musicians have utilized initials for song titles -- Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T.," Abba's "S.O.S.," Donald Fagen's "I.G.Y.," etc. But the more curiously initialed tune has to be "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.," short for "Voyage to the Land of the Freeze-Dried Godzilla Farts." Fishbone's original guitarist, Kendall Jones, explained to Rolling Stone, "When Norwood [Fisher] wrote it, he introduced it to the band saying, 'Man, I've been hearing about all these Nazi right-wing groups on the news saying the Holocaust was staged. So what if America said it never dropped two atom bombs on Japan, that it was actually Godzilla popping a couple off?' Only Norwood would come up with something that out." The same year "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F." was released, the film Godzilla 1985 appeared in North America.

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